The Wizards of Langley (32 page)

The first test subject was Ingo Swann, a New York artist who had been involved in psychic experiments at the City College of New York. In June 1972, Puthoff invited him to SRI to demonstrate his alleged abilities. For the first test, Swann was taken to a superconducting shielded magnetometer at Stanford University that was being used in quark experiments. According to accounts that accept the existence of psychic abilities, when Swann directed his attention to the interior of the magnetometer, there was a disturbance in its output signal, indicating a change in the internal magnetic field. In addition, other signal variations were observed in response to his mental efforts, variations never witnessed before or after his visit. A description of the events was transmitted in a letter to OSI and in discussions with OTS and ORD representatives.
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TSD followed up by arranging for an experiment, costing less than $1,000, in which Swann was asked to describe objects hidden by TSD personnel—specifically, a live brown moth placed in a sealed box. Reportedly, Swann stated that “I see something small, brown, and irregular, sort of like a leaf, or something that resembles it, except that it seems very much alive, like it’s even moving!” The results led then TSD head Sidney Gottlieb to approve another $2,500 in funding and suggest development of a more detailed research agenda.
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Just as was the case with the MKULTRA experiments, part of the interest was in determining what results the Soviets might be achieving in their work and how those results might be used in operations against the CIA and the United States. In July 1972, the Defense Intelligence Agency published one of what would be several studies dealing with Soviet bloc research in the parapsychology field. The study examined purported Soviet efforts with respect to ESP, pyschokinesis, astral projection, clairvoyance, and other reputed paranormal phenomena.
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By October 1972, TSD authorized a $50,000 Biofield Measurements Program and appointed Kenneth Kress to monitor the activity. Over the next eight months, experiments progressed from attempts to “remote view” objects hidden in boxes to viewing sites in the San Francisco Bay area to which SRI employees had been sent as “beacons.” In February 1973, halfway through the contract, a review of the results led several ORD officers to favor contributing personnel and funding from their office. At about the same time, a third remote viewer, Pat Price, joined the project. Price was a small-building contractor, who had served as a local councilman in Burbank in the 1950s and briefly had been the town’s police commissioner. He had met Puthoff at a lecture in Los Angeles a few years earlier, and had run into Puthoff and Swann in late 1972 while he was selling Christmas trees.
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In late April 1973, a management review involving OTS, ORD, and Executive Director William Colby allowed the project to continue, although Kress was told not to increase the scope of the project or anticipate any follow-on funding. There was a potential for significant embarrassment, and OTS already had enough problems—it was being investigated for possible involvement in Watergate.
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But this guidance did not prevent a somewhat different approach. Swann had suggested that instead of relying on a “beacon” individual at sites to be viewed (which certainly would not be feasible with regard to the sensitive Soviet and Chinese sites), the viewer be given geographic coordinates and asked to view the facility or
activity at those coordinates. Such a procedure was dubbed Scanate—
Scan
ning by coordi
nate
.
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That approach was a step in the direction McMahon wanted the effort to go—away from experimentation and toward application. He considered parapsychology an “extremely attractive” approach to intelligence collection and argued that standard intelligence sensors operated “in narrow bands.” Thus, there was reason to expect, in his view, that information in other bands could be obtained if “the right receiver” could be developed. OTS, however, was not in business to conduct pure research but rather to support the CIA’s clandestine operators.
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In summer 1973, Puthoff asked an OSI official to give him “coordinates of a place I don’t know anything about” for him to pass on to the remote viewers. The official responded, “I’ll do you one better. I’ll get you the coordinates of some place even
I
don’t know about.” A colleague in the CIA provided the OSI official with a set of coordinates, without further explanation.
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In late May, Ingo Swann sat at one end of a table in the SRI conference room, wrote down the coordinates read by Puthoff, and began his 3,000- mile psychic journey. After six minutes, he had produced an account that included rolling hills, a city to the north, lawns similar to the ones found at a military base, and a flagpole. He also spent an hour at home the following morning viewing the target, although the effort didn’t add much to his description.
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On June 1, two days after Swann’s at-home viewing, Price was given the same coordinates as Swann. On June 4, Price’s report, dated June 2, of his viewing was received in the mail. The result was a more detailed account of the site, although one that was consistent with Swann’s report. Beyond descriptions of the terrain and the assertion that it was a former missile base, Price claimed that he saw an underground area used for record storage as well as to house computers, communication equipment, and large maps. He also saw personnel from the Army 5th Corps of Engineers and the Army Signal Corps.
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Subsequently, he was asked to revisit the site and report on any information concerning code words stamped on documents at the site. According to Price, there was a file cabinet on one wall. The first two words on its label were “Operation Pool . . .” with the final word unclear. Files inside the cabinet were labeled CUEBALL, 14 BALL, 4 BALL, 8 BALL, and RACKUP. On the top of one desk were papers labeled FLYTRAP and MINERVA, and the code name associated with the site seemed to be
HAYFORK or HAYSTACK. Price also came up with the names of personnel—a Colonel R. J. Hamilton, Major General George Nash, and possibly a Major John C. Calhoun.
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The OSI officer took the information to the colleague who had provided him with the coordinates, who said that Swann and Price were not even close, that their reports were “bullshit”—the coordinates corresponded to his summer cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. However, the OSI officer remained intrigued with the similarity of the descriptions and decided to find out if there was an installation near his friend’s retreat similar to that described by the two remote viewers.
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Indeed, the OSI staffer discovered a huge facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia. Nominally a U.S. Navy communications facility, it actually was a National Security Agency intercept site, with a variety of eavesdropping antennae, including a sixty-foot receiving dish for pulling in the traffic from INTELSAT and other satellites. Operations were directed from a two-story underground building.
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The intelligence mission was secret, but the facility, given its ostensible function, was not.

The results of Swann’s and Price’s psychic journeys to the West Virginia mountains were the subject of an October 1 report to the CIA. The following month, a “Top-Secret/Codeword Eyes Only” memo evaluated selected results of the experiments. A map drawn by Swann was “correct,” while the terrain was “exactly as drawn” by Price, and was “not otherwise accessible to non-base personnel.” Elevations given by Price were correct to within 100 feet, and there was “an astonishing similarity between [Price’s] description of the facility, some dissimilarities, but most of the important ones do match.”
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The code words elicited by Price were “current or past active COMINT descriptives.” An initial survey showed all the code words to be inactive by 1966, but subsequent investigation turned up two that were relevant to the site but unfamiliar to current personnel. In addition, the site reference (code name) was also among the words reported by Price. One individual named by Price was an NSA security officer, although the memo noted that it was not known whether “he was present during [Price’s] alleged ‘visit.’” The other individuals named were also DOD personnel but were not familiar to personnel at the site who were asked.
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The same memo also evaluated summer remote-viewing sessions that involved a Soviet installation in the Urals and a joint French-Soviet meteorological station on Kerguelen Island in the southern Indian Ocean. Price had “discovered” the Urals site at Mount Narodnaya on his own,
without the apparent provision of coordinates. He described an underground facility, helipads, a railway, and a radar installation 30 miles to the north of the site with a 165-foot dish and two small dishes.
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The CIA memo referred to Price’s description as generally correct with regard to “topography and location of radar dishes.” There was a discrepancy between the number of dishes “viewed” by Price and those shown in KH-4 satellite imagery from 1972. There was only one radar dome visible, and that was 60–100 miles from the facility as opposed to 30 miles. There was no evidence on the satellite imagery of a railway or helipads. Despite the discrepancies, Price’s descriptions of the site, the Abez space tracking facility, ranged from “similar to identical.” The memo also commented that the odds were “over one million to one” that Price could have provided the description based on coincidence or guess, even with the inaccuracies—although there was no explanation as to the basis upon which those odds were calculated.
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The description of the Indian Ocean facility was produced by Swann after Puthoff had been given the coordinates by his OSI contact. In addition to its acknowledged function, the site was rumored to double, at least for the Soviets, as an intercept or missile tracking station.
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The CIA assessment noted that the “descriptions are rather precise, and correct to the limits of KH-4 photography” and that “description of installation functions correct.” Other descriptions were not verifiable on the basis of information available to the CIA.
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The memo’s author noted that he had no “explanation in fact or in principle” for the results and verified that [Price] “is a highly gifted subject capable of obtaining accurate ‘visual’ information at a distance by non-ordinary means.” He went on to state that “whether this information is obtained by paranormal ability or not remains open to speculation.”
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An attached memo from Puthoff ’s OSI contact noted that he was informed that Puthoff’s laboratory would likely be terminated “unless at least a modest level of support can be obtained . . . from a reputable Governmental agency such as CIA.” The OSI official also noted that the SRI vice-president for research informed him that SRI could find no evidence of fraud. Nor could the CIA official, although he refused to offer an ironclad statement with regard to experiments in which he had not participated.
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The memo, however, did not discuss a number of issues that would be expected to arise in evaluating the extraordinary claims arising from the remote-viewing experiments—in particular with regard to the Sugar Grove site. Neither Swann nor Price conducted his remote viewing under
circumstances in which his lack of access to outside information could be verified. In addition, there was no concern expressed, at least in the memo, about Puthoff ’s having worked at NSA in the early 1960s—which might have given him access to information about Sugar Grove, including about code words and personnel. Suspicion might have been heightened by Price’s reporting of a number of obsolete code words—the type of error that could be explained by his having been provided the information by someone who had access at an earlier time but not any longer. Nor did there appear to be any examination of public information, such as media coverage about the targets, information that certainly was available about the existence of a facility at Sugar Grove.
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In any case, the summer 1973 experiments were reviewed by Colby, who had replaced Schlesinger as DCI in September; McMahon; and Sayre Stevens, who had become director of ORD in July 1972 and was far less enthusiastic than McMahon about such activities. He even told Duckett he “was out of his mind” to approve such research.* Nevertheless, a jointly funded ORD-OTS program commenced in February 1974. The premise behind the program was that paranormal phenomena such as remote viewing existed; the objective was to develop and exploit them for intelligence purposes. ORD funds were used for research into measurable physiological or psychological characteristics of individuals believed to have psychic capabilities and the establishment of protocols for verifying such abilities. OTS funding was used to assess the operational utility of paranormal capabilities.
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It was not long before a number of problems developed with the program, including the objection of ORD scientists that the tests being conducted by SRI were not sufficiently rigorous.
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Such objections were also raised by the broader scientific community. Later in 1974, Puthoff and Targ published some of their remote-viewing experiments in the prestigious science journal
Nature
. However, an accompanying editorial comment noted that “there was agreement that the paper was weak in design and presentation, to the extent that details given as to the precise way in which the experiment was carried out were disconcertingly vague.” Further, all the referees felt that the details of the various safeguards taken to rule out fraud were “uncomfortably vague.”
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